Float: the “Netflix of reading” brought to you by the “YouTube of documents”

A new reading product from Scribd plans to take on Instapaper and other …

“Reading for pleasure is an extraordinary activity,” psychologist Victor Nell once wrote. “The black squiggles on the white page are still as the grave, colorless as the moonlit desert; but they give the skilled reader a pleasure as acute as the touch of a loved body….”

Nell crafted that passage in 1988, predating smartphones, iPads, and e-reading devices like the Kindle. Now, his words tantalize us. Our shiny new devices deliver the written word to us anywhere, instantly. Yet we yearn for a reading experience as vivid as those black squiggles on the white page that he mentions.

Scribd’s new reading product, Float, is not as epochal as the printed book. But that’s not from a lack of ambition from the company that has made previous claims to being “the YouTube of documents.” (Scribd has had over 2 billion user-provided pages viewed by the 75 million readers who visit each month). Scribd Tuesday is releasing what it calls a “revolutionary digital reading service” that processes all the stuff you can read on the Web—news articles, blogs, long-form stories, and other documents—and tries to make them as pleasurable to read as books, as well as making them sharable to friends and contacts.

“We saw there was digital reading in all sorts of devices and applications,” says Scribd’s 27-year-old CEO, Trip Adler, “and we figured that someone needed to bring it all together.”

Float has two key aspects. The first is the reading application itself. At one time, devoted readers would have deemed it an atrocity to read long-form texts on the tiny screens of iPhones—but now the prospect no longer shocks. Float attempts to go farther than competing apps (like Instapaper) in making the experience easy on the eyes and unobtrusive to one’s consciousness.

It’s harder than one might expect to reformat text from various sources in a highly readable form on an iPhone. To crack this problem, Scribd hired Oliver Drobnik—aka “Dr. Touch,” an Austrian iOS expert. He developed a system that allows users to advance text via familiar finger-swipes of scrolling and page-turn—and also lets them resize the text by the multi-touch conventions of stretch and pinch. To outsiders, the company refers to this as “floating text,” ergo the product name. But inside Scribd, they refer to this advance as “spaceship navigation.”

You can download your reading list to consume it offline. There’s also a variety of reading “styles,” including NightTime (which is less disturbing to a bedmate trying to sleep) and Sunlight Reading. (Some of the other styles are garish novelties-gothic font, or one that emulates an old-style DOS screen-that weren’t what Victor Nell had in mind.)

As one might expect from Scribd (which uses a social component in its original document-sharing service), Float incorporates sharing into the app. In fact, it’s a spiritual cousin to Spotify, released last week in the US Just as Spotify allows you to share songs and view playlists of friends, Float enables users to expose their reading lists and preferences. There’s also a form of following that lets you track users with a nose for news or just good reads. You can link accounts from Twitter and Facebook and get an instant reading list from the links shared by your contacts.

The other important part of Float is its business plan and partnerships. Yes, this is yet another attempt to monetize an industry blessed with avid digital readers and cursed by their expectation that reading matter should be free. Scribd has convinced over 150 popular websites and blogs (including Wired.com) to provide initial content, and hopes are to expand that over time. For now, it’s free, but that will change as ads arrive (Adler likes the magazine publishing model where good looking advertisements and quality prose blissfully coexist), and, eventually, a paywall which will provide access to a plethora of high quality reading matter.

Think of it, says Adler, as a “Netflix of reading.”

Scribd hasn’t decided what the monthly fee for that should be, but Adler says that the $8 to $10 range of services like Netflix and Spotify sounds about right. If the service included books—a concept that certainly has crossed Adler’s mind—the fees might be higher.

Costs aside, Scribd definitely wants Float to be the main way our eyes devour reading matter on the gadgets we keep close to our bodies. “We want it to be a product that’s difficult to live without” he says.